Krita Gemini is a painting application which adjusts to your needs - with a powerful, feature-rich interface on your PC, and a streamlined touch-friendly sketching interface on your tablet or convertible. With a range of tools and features suitable for novice or professional artists.

June 27

It's taken a little while (that and we forgot to make an announcement when we pushed an update previously...) but we're happy to announce that there is an update to the desktop29 branch. This took a little longer as we encountered some problems with a previous update and didn't want to release it until we had a chance to fix it.

About This Software

Krita Gemini is a painting application which adjusts to your requirements - giving you a fully featured desktop experience on your PC, and a streamlined touch-friendly sketching interface on your tablet, convertible or big screen! All users will enjoy the range of realistic and experimental brushes. Professional artists will enjoy the fast, high-quality rendering options and support for various colorspaces and profiles.

Krita Gemini is built upon Krita, the world's foremost open-source painting application. Krita is used by both hobbyists and professional artists in game studios, the VFX industry and design studios. Artists use the uniquely innovative brush engines and the intuitive, fun interface to create concept art, texture and matte paintings, illustrations, storyboards and more.

All the work that goes into Gemini feeds back into the open source project, so by buying Gemini, you are also helping directly to support Krita's development!

Upgrades

We are offering two options for purchasing Krita Gemini - a cheap "2 releases" version, which provides around a year's worth of feature updates, and a "lifetime upgrades" package which will receive all future releases. Customers who purchased Krita Gemini during Early Access already have Lifetime upgrades!
Currently Krita Gemini 2.9 is due for release in late fall 2014, with 3.0 due for release in late spring 2015.

Try Krita now!

There are two different ways to get a feel for what Krita Gemini can do for you: the Steam demo, and the free Krita Desktop.
The Steam demo provides just the sketch interface that provides a simpler set of tools, but uses the same powerful brush and rendering engines.
You can download Krita Desktop for free from the Krita Foundation website.

Krita Gemini provides both interfaces with automatic switching on 2-in-1 convertible devices, support for Steam features and the added convenience of automatic updates.

Features

An adaptive multi-modal interface which works on the desktop, on touchscreens and in Big Picture mode

Over a dozen different brush engines, supporting pressure sensitivity, tilt, rotation and other features of graphics tablets

Over a hundred default brushes carefully selected by professional artists

Customizable brush presets, to create your own incredible brushes

OpenGL powered canvas with high-bit-depth monitor support and high quality scaling

Update: Krita 2.96 beta branch starts atleast twice as fast as prior versions did for me on steam. The 45 plus second start was very annoying, but it's gone for me now. I really hope it doesn't come back.

Krita is pretty much all of the tools you are wanting for digital painting, except that it requires a few workarounds for relatively simple tools. Krita also has 64 bit options. The main problem with Krita for me is the menus. Nearly everything is not where I think it is. It takes me a long time to find what I'm looking for in the drop down menus. If the members on the forums weren't so friendly, I doubt I'd have found Krita so enjoyable. Other than these quibbles, Krita is a fantastic and powerful image editor and painter.

When Krita came out on Steam, it 'had the most tools' and the 'greatest variety of uses'. That spot on Steam belongs to PD Howler now(32bit with GPU processing options), which has things in the drop down menus where I expect them to be, but has chosen a non-standard buffer workflow over an alpha layer workflow.

One of Krita's advantages is the lifetime DLC. Krita might be the only software with it. If this was 3D, Curvy3D and AGF have definitely made significant updates without additional cost, but in 2D, Krita with it's lifetime DLC is nice in the longterm.

This is a great digital painting software that has a lot to offer. Included is everything you would need to get personal or even professional work done. You can flip and rotate the canvas like in SAI, there are perspective tools to guide scene creation, a plethora of usefull brushes (speedpaint sketch being my favorite), not to mention all the filters and photo manipulation that you would find in photoshop. I love that I can resize the canvas without interfiering with the drawing. I love that every brush can be used as an eraser with just a toggle key. It's as fast and light as SAI with all the functionality of bulky photoshop.

I would love to see a more focused direction though. Having all this functionality can sometimes get in the way of whats important in a program like this. Getting straight into the work with clear intuitive controls and minimizing any bumps that get in the way and allowing the user to get a hold of the full functionality with little effort. I find that less clutter and more user control via hotkeys and slidders the better. This is aimed at visual people after all. I would also like them to take advantage of modifier keys.

Thankfully they are adding the ability to switch between brushes with hotkeys. No information on when that will be, but it's this kind of functionality that speeds up the painting process. Less time fiddling around in tool windows and more time spent with your eyes on the canvas.

The dev's have been very attentive during the entire early access process of this software. I've personally provided lots of feedback that I've already seen results from. A big thumbs up to this dev team and the fact that they do care about the user and want to shape Krita around our needs. Gemini already came in with a good foundation of standard features that you expect to see in a digital painting software. So theres a lot to build on for them going forward now. It still needs a lot of work and I hope people will continue to provide usefull feedback. Krita Gemini has really benifited from the early access.

There's a lot that can be said about this software, some good and some bad. So I'm going to list the Pros and Cons of the software as well as a tl;dr at the bottom.

Pros: The wrap-around feature which is surprisingly well implemented and easy to useThe brushes are well done and almost any brush you'd need for a drawing or painting is already implementedIf a brush you need is not implemented you can tweak every brush to your hearts content and save it as a presetThe perspective grid is easily created and edited to create near perfect perspective drawingsPhotoshop-like layers which will make any photoshop user feel right at homeExcellent developer response (Read below if you want more information)Don't have enough money to buy Krita Gemini? Go to their site and get the free Krita Desktop, same software almost except no Steam support and a few features aren't there but other than that the same thing but free. (But buy Krita Gemini as soon as you have enough money)

Developer Response:I'm the only person having the problem in the cons list and they responded and talked to me one on one on steam in order to understand the problem so they can try and fix it ASAP. It's like everyone is having the problem and they want to fix it quickly. GREAT developer response and I think better than what I've ever seen in my entire life. Sure it took a few days for them to actually see my review but I'd rather wait a few days and get this kind of customer service than wait a few days and they do nothing or not even get a response in general.

Edit:Figured out how to use pen pressure, I guess my tablet was just screwing up so NOT THE PROGRAMS FAULT. With pen pressure lines are AMAZINGLY smooth and I'm beginning to like this program more than Photoshop as it's MUCH cheaper and just runs better in general.

Tldr; Excellent customer service, excellent tools, and professional brushes make this an EXCELLENT buy.

Let me make one thing very clear... as a former photoshop user who uses a cintiq, KRITA is by far one of the best illustration applications I have ever used.

I am not over exagerating. I began playing with it when it was barely usable on Windows, since then its grown by leaps and bounds. Its not only extremely stable, but one of the most natural feeling painting applications I have ever used. I have no need to go back to photoshop unless it involves advanced photomanipulation or plugins, and even then it is painfully obvious that this will be temporary. Why? Because Krita develops at an extremely fast place. It is literally the best photoshop alternative on the market.

I have been on their developer IRC channels, they know what they are doing and with financial support coming in from steam as well as Kickstarter, they are truly making one of the best 2d applications on the market right now. Not to mention it is FREE and open source if you go to their website.

That said, if you like it, use it, buy it on steam or donate. It is worth every penny and it supports the developers. I cannot stress enough how great this application is. Give it a try, learn how to use it, you will love it.